elfin
/ˈɛlfɪn/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: 2.26 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
2
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An elf; an inhabitant of fairy-land.
noun
Any of the butterflies in the subgenus Incisalia of the North American lycaenid genus Callophrys.
adj
Resembling an elf or elves, especially in tiny size or features.
Example Sentences
- "It was quite an expedition that Ida met, a kind of elfin's rout it looked in the moonlight, children and animals and a fairy-like presence with a face like a moon-lily, all scampering and squealing and whoofing and miauling in a merry game they were making of their progress."
- "The Elf-bolt is associated with many rustic fancies not yet altogether eradicated from the popular mind. It occupied no unimportant part among the paraphernalia of Scottish witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the occurrence of any sudden disease amongst cattle was ascribed until a comparatively recent period, to their having been shot by the fairies with Elfin arrows."
- "If Burd Ellen had gone “widishins" round the church, she would, I think, have used the best homoeopathic specific against the Elf-King's power; for "to go widishins" was the chief element in elfin practices, and if mortals wished to resist or unspell elf-craft, they, too, had "to go widershins," or they had to repeat the Paternoster backwards, which came to the same thing, or do something else contrariwise."
- "She was one of those elfin, rather precocious little girls, quick coloured, with dark hair, naturally curling dusky hair that was sometimes astray over her eyes, and eyes that were sometimes impishly dark, and sometimes a clear brown yellow."
- "Three chairs of the steamer type, all maimed, comprised the furniture of this roof-garden, with […] on one of the copings a row of four red clay flower-pots filled with sun-baked dust from which gnarled and rusty stalks thrust themselves up like withered elfin limbs."
- "He’s forced to travel back to 1969 to prevent an evil alien (a shockingly effective, nearly unrecognizable Jemaine Clement of Flight Of The Conchords, playing sort of a psychotic extraterrestrial-biker serial killer) from destroying the world by killing Brolin. Smith is aided in his quest by an elfin, time-jumping alien with psychic powers played by another Coen brothers veteran, A Serious Man star Michael Stuhlbarg."
Etymology
From Middle English elven, from Old English elfen, ælfen (“nymph, spirit, fairy”), feminine of elf, ælf (“elf”), equivalent to elf + -in. Cognate with Middle High German elbinne (“a fairy, nymph”).